Around September 2012 Facebook started rolling out a gift feature to its users, that allows you to pick a physical gift for a friend and then pay for it, then Facebook sends them a notification with a preview of the gift along with a virtual Card to the recipient alerting them to enter in their shipping address.

You normally see the option to send a gift when viewing a birthday reminder, and a gift button in the area where you write on someone else’s wall.

Facebook is promoting this feature today for Valentine’s day by featuring a little ad above your news feed. If you’re in a relationship, it will say something like “Add [gift name] to your list of Valentine’s Day surprises for [the person you’re in a relationship with].” Single people, like me, sees a more generic message saying “Surprise Your Friends For [dollar amount]” featuring a random Valentine’s Day related product, like the one pictured in this article.

I wonder how successful this campaign will be with Facebook having 618 million daily active users, some with more or less money than others. What other holidays would you like to see a similar promotion on? I expect for Christmas they’ll do a similar promotion but a week or so before Christmas so it can say something like “Order by December ##, and get it shipped before Christmas.”.